The Populism-Neoliberalism-Nexus

Routledge, 2020

In this book, Enrico Padoan proposes an original middle-range theory to explain the emergence and the internal organisation of anti-neoliberal populist parties in Latin America and Southern Europe, and the relationships between these parties and the organised working class. Padoan begins by tracing the diverging evolution of the electoral Lefts in Latin America and Southern Europe in the aftermath of economic crises, and during the implementation of austerity measures within many of these nations. A causal typology for interpreting the possible outcomes of the realignments within the electoral Lefts is proposed. Hereafter, the volume features fi ve empirical chapters, four of which focus on the rise of anti-neoliberal populist parties in Bolivia, Argentina, Spain and Italy, while a fi fth off ers an analysis on four 'shadow cases' in Venezuela, Uruguay, Portugal and Greece. Scholars of Latin America and Comparative Politics will fi nd Anti-Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective a highly valuable resource, off ering a distinctive perspective on the impact of diff erent populisms on party systems and on the challenges that such populisms posed to syndicalism and to traditional left-of-centre parties.

Journal of World-Systems Research, 2018

The unpredicted success of the numerous candidates, parties, and movements colloquially labeled as 'populist' has reignited both academic and popular interest in the broader concept of populism itself. Noting the proximately concurrent rise of these various characters and movements, many Abstract While conventional studies of electoral populism acknowledge that such mobilizations are linked to significant economic crises, their preoccupation with defining what exactly populism is often leads them to downplay the unified structural roots of different sorts of populist mobilizations. This essay presents the beginnings of an alternative framework for the study of electoral populism that draws on the neo-Gramscian theory of political articulation that links studies of global economic crises with conventional theories of populism. While crises are an endemic feature of global capitalism, their political manifestation is shaped by the varied institutional structures and legacies in which they are translated.

Populism participates extensively as a term in our daily discourse, but remains poorly understood as it relates to our reality. Deconstructing how democracy declines in the Neoliberal Age reveals several important elements: 1) democracy loses its substance in a neoliberalism; 2) liberalization is its own category of analysis that has temporal limits and can help describe the lifecycle of a political regime; 3) populism transforms from a political tool to the raw material of political order, depending on whether liberalization has crossed its natural limits.

Forum for Social Economics

The paper compares neoliberal market-fundamentalism and right-wing populism on the basis of its core patterns of thinking and reasoning. Hence we offer an analysis of the work of important founders of market-fundamental economic thinking (particularly von Mises) and an established definition of populism (demonstrated by the example of arguments brought forward by leading populists, like Trump). In doing so, we highlight conceptual resemblances of these two approaches: Both assume a dually divided world that is split into only two countervailing parts. Right-wing populism shows a society split into two groups, fighting against each other. In a similar vein, neoliberal market-fundamentalists argue that there are only two possible countervailing economic and societal orders. We argue that the categorical analogies between neoliberal marketfundamentalism and right-wing populism could provide the basis for a new form of authoritarian neoliberalism.

Public Lecture – Indore Press Club. Trying my hand at an analysis of authoritarian populism across the North-South axis of the world-system.

National Institute Economic Review, 2022

Much of the media coverage in relation to populism has focused either on populist moments like the Brexit vote or on populist leaders such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. Meanwhile, the academic literature on populism is divided between two broad approaches. First, an emphasis in economics on policy (e.g. Dornbusch and Edwards, 1992) and, second, an accentuation in political science on ideology (e.g. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Both approaches capture important aspects, including the rejection of orthodox monetary and fiscal policy positions and a repudiation not only of established elites but also of pluralism and some of the key institutions on which the rule of law and democracy depend. However, these perspectives risk under-exploring some of the long-term structural patterns that are political, economic and social all at once. They include the decline in voter turnout, the collapse of centreleft and centre-right political traditions, the rise in popular support for populist parties or candidates, the effects of deindustrialisation on long-term unemployment and of low wages on falling living standards as well as a sense of powerless and a loss of both community cohesion and identity. The roots of populism go deep and stretch back in time-the economic recessions in the 1980s and early 1990s and the structural upward shift in joblessness, the social crises of the 2000s and 2010s linked to fiscal retrenchment as well as cultural change and the resurgence of extremes such as nationalism and xenophobia (e.g. Aiginger, 2020). The electoral success of populists tends to be a symptom rather than the cause of populism, while the consequences of populist politics (and technocratic responses) are often further to divide countries along both older cultural and class lines as well as newer cleavages of education, age and assets. It is also the case that populist methods, such as the use of demagogic speech in public discussion and political debate, can be deployed by established elites and emerging insurgents alike. Establishment leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair and David Cameron resorted to populist rhetoric in ways that were not entirely dissimilar to right-wing populist leaders from Silvio Berlusconi to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson or left-wing ones such as Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez or the leaders of Syriza and Podemos in Europe. The demon of demagoguery besets democracy that is variously more liberal or more authoritarian (Pabst, 2019). This NIER Special Issue explores the complex phenomenon of populism and popular support for populists from a broad perspective of political economy (Guriev and Papaioannou, 2021). The twin focus is on the drivers of populism and the implications for democracy and the market economy. Although the various contributions differ in terms of their methodology or findings, they share a number of closely connected arguments. One argument is the importance of both formal structures and informal norms to support a functioning democracy, economy and society. Another argument relates to the need for existing political and economic systems to address the grievances underpinning the appeal of populists. A third argument is that populism claims to defend democracy against 'corrupt' and 'unaccountable' elites, but, in reality, it tends to advance authoritarianism, undermines the institutions of representative government and fails to help the most vulnerable groups in society.

European Journal of Sociology, 2016

Most scholars focus on the macro outcomes and characteristics of neoliberalism, such as privatization, financialization, welfare gutting, and decentralization. A scholarly tradition that draws on Foucault's biopolitics lectures has emphasized an arguably more thorough transformation that neoliberalism brings about: the re-making of the individual and all of her qualities in the image of an entrepreneur. Wendy Brown has been one of the leading voices in this scholarship on (what has been called) "neoliberal subjectivity."

Policy Studies, 2018

Populism is a contested concept. In this conclusion we do not want to rehearse these contestations. Rather, we re-emphasize: the extent of the threat that populism poses for liberal democracy; the failure of most mainstream Economists and Political Science to understand the nature of the threat; and the putative ways of renewing democracy.

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019

Following a previous article where I defined how a concept becomes a weapon of ideological wars, this article seeks to clarify why there are semantic connections of the actual concept of 'populism' with the semantics of the concept of crisis (illness, destruction of democracy, salvation or condemnation). My key argument is to focus on how actors use the concept of populism on the public sphere with the goal to inspire fear instead of allowing citizens and theorists to understand what is behind our present political-economic crisis. In my view, both theorists and politicians should be aware how a concept that lacks any precision does not help us to understand our present moment of crisis. We must use other tools and the help of historians to understand why has neo-liberal politics unleashed this present crisis.

Relating Judis' analysis of the recent rise of populism in Western Europe and in the U.S. to the crisis of the Left, it is argued that the most pertinent adversary of the progressive movement today is no longer the neo-liberal establishment but the populist politics that it created.

Synopsis The global resurgence of populism today is widely noted but poorly understood. The People in Crisis argues for an historical materialist understanding of that resurgence, articulating a conception of populism as a specific dynamic of reaction and constructive enactment of popular power and sovereignty in response to key contradictions intrinsic to capitalist society and its political forms, grounded in class antagonisms yet simultaneously obscuring and reforming them, refracted through the political-economic framework of liberal, representative democracy. The evolutions of capitalism and liberal democracy were largely linked and reciprocally determining over the course of a long twentieth century, as intersecting trends of the centralization and concentration of capital and the hollowing of participatory democratic forms. Since the 1970s, " neoliberalism " has brought these trends and their contradictions to a point of crisis and, then, interregnum. In that interregnum, populism has gone from being an episodically realized potential of capitalist democracies to a " common sense " of political and economic antagonism.

The seminar starts with the question how globalization and neoliberalism contribute to the global rise of nationalist politics and populist movements. Particularly right wing populism is brought into connection with international far right movements, racism, Islamophobia, violence and the rejection of globalization. The seminar looks at these implications by first reading anthropological work regarding the concepts " globalization " and " neoliberalism. " Then, we will connect these works with current debates and academic analyses of right wing and left wing populism. We will ask which processes and reasoning form the basis of populist activities / demands / rejections and how these movements, in various media, are brought into connection with the phenomenon of globalization and neoliberal politics. We then discuss how we can empirically and critically study such processes.

2017

The word populism has been associated to (very) different meanings in the last years. The " populist " label is still used to describe parties, leaders, movements, attitudes and political regimes, too. Moreover, the adjective " populist " is used in a normative fashion in the public debate to denigrate those movements or parties which contrast the mainstream views. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, I conduct a non-normative analysis to avoid a biased vision of the concept. On the other hand, I advocate the understanding of populism as a thin-centered ideology, according to which it is based on two necessary features, namely, (a) an anti-elite(s) mindset and (b) the criticism of representative politics. Resumen El término populismo ha sido asociado a significados muy diferentes en los últimos años. La eti-queta de populista se sigue utilizando para describir partidos, líderes, movimientos, actitudes y regímenes políticos. Además, el adjetivo populista se utiliza también con una inclinación norma-tiva en el debate público para denigrar a esos movimientos o partidos que contrastan con las ideo-logías dominantes. Este artículo tienes dos objetivos principales: por un lado, desarrollo un análisis conceptual no normativo para evitar una visión sesgada del concepto. Por otra parte, abogo por una consideración del populismo como una ideología débil, según la cual se basa en dos caracte-rísticas necesarias, a saber, (a) el anti-elitismo y (b) la crítica de la política representativa. Palabras clave: populismo, política comparada, análisis conceptual, ideología débil.

2019

Of all “-isms” in the political science lexicon and in the journalistic discourse, populism easily distinguishes itself from others. We usually know what’s liberalism, socialism or feminism and we are able to identify who belongs to their ideological communities. However, when it comes to populism, confusion arises to pin down the concept. Neither scholarly consensus exist for the definition of populism, nor there is a common agreement on the ideological ingredients derived from the populist perspective. Closely related, populism is often asserted pejoratively and used extremely liberally. This is to the extent that populism does not get into a debate as to what the core meanings and theories of the concept are. To be more precise, the concept of populism has long been in an intellectual torture chamber from which it could not have managed to escape yet. This is an interesting phenomenon because populism was first introduced to the vocabulary as a self-descriptive term used by the adherents of the populist movement in the United States in the late 1800s. Almost at the same time, through in a different continent, an analogous political movement emerged onto stage in Russia and the members of this ideological community called themselves ‘narodniks’. Today, there is no doubt about the term ‘narodnik’ serving as a Russian equivalent of ‘populist’ and ‘narodchivesto’ that translate as ‘populism’. Having this knowledge in mind, a prominent question arises; “how is it possible that populism has become a pejorative concept?” The answer to this question is the consideration of this dissertation. It first undertakes a profound comparative analysis of the ideologies of these two political movements. Remaining in the realm of ideological debates, it then identifies the roles of intellectuals in the pejoration of the concept of populism. With these findings, the present dissertation hopes to give an accurate account to those who dedicate their endeavors to save populism from its conceptual slipperiness and assign it a genuine meaning.